A very short post to share this tool with you.
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I don’t know about you, but most of my thinking time happens when I am driving all alone in my car. This is mainly because that must be about the only time in the day I am alone- Hey, I am not complaining here but it’s difficult to do any decent thinking we when you spend all your day surrounded by teenagers – my own and my students. So, here I was, in my car, driving to work and thinking about the best way to teach Adverbs of Manner to my students when I remembered an exercise I did while taking a course in IH London.
The idea is to combine Adverbs of Manner and Intonation in a very funny way, though to get to the funny part of the exercise there are, first of all, some steps to climb.
Step 1. This is the boring part. On the board, I write the adjectives I am going to use in Step 3 and ask students to form the adverbs of these adjectives(see worksheet ).
Step 2. Now it’s time to start working with intonation. I draw on the board a stave and demonstrate the power of intonation with the word Thank You! It might be necessary to repeat the expression a few times before students associate pitch with meaning
-low pitch= sarcastic, depressed, negative
-middle pitch= neutral
-high pitch = very positive
Students in pairs practise a few times.
Step 3. With the adverbs still on display on the blackboard I give each student a slip of paper with the adverbs of manner: furiously, quickly, cheerfully (Worksheet here). Students now stand up and in pairs tell each other the words I LOVE YOU using the correct pitch to convey the way they feel. The other student should be able to guess the adverb written on the card. Students move around the class talking to as many students as they can. Time limit: 5 minutes.
Step 4. Feedback: students, now, read their I LOVE YOUs aloud for everybody in the class to guess the adverb of manner.
Learn English and Have Fun!!
Do you know anyone, especially students, who would not rather have a lesson spiced up with pictures? Now, this is an amazing tool to work with and just plain fun! Tag Galaxy appeals to all visual students and it helps spice up a boring lesson. Have I just said” boring lessons”??? Sorry! a slip of the tongue!!
How does it work? Easy peasy! You enter a tag – I wrote Hobbies- and as soon as you click GO , you will see a 3D galaxy with lots of planets of different sizes. The biggest one is for my Tag ( in this case Hobbies) and the smaller planets will be words related to the keyword orbiting around my keyword
At this point you might click on another planet to combine words ( Hobbies+ books) and form a new galaxy.
Click on the big planet and see your picture collection , straight from Flikr assembling.
Spin the globe with the mouse. Click to select a picture and get a close -up. Cool!
Tag Galaxy in the classroom: I’m sure my students will be delighted to watch the whole process but leaving aside the cool part, I think using this wonderful tool can be highly motivating for my students.
♥ At the moment I’m teaching Simple Past tense to my Elementary students and I’m planning to use it to do some speaking with the structure:
When did you last….? (play football)
I last( played football )( three weeks ago) + the follow up questions.
♥It could also work for Picture Description
♥Writing Skills: Students are given the beginning of a story such as: it was a stormy night … Students write “storm” as the keyword and the picures will help them spark their creativity.
Are you looking for a job?? Do you need to write a formal letter applying for a job?
In this Power Point Presentation I help my students write a simple Application Letter studying the Layout of this kind of letters, giving them some tips to take into consideration when writing them and reading a Sample Letter to have as a reference. There is also a simple Step-by -Step Letter of Application to do some practise.
Hope it is helpful!
If you are one of my students in the first course, you know I’m not exaggerating the slightest bit (well, maybe the “burping” thing is too much) when I say I’m going to wallpaper the classroon with this funny cartoon I came across on Pinterest.
The moment I read it I realized it was perfect to teach my youngest students the -ing form because it is something they can easily relate with and have fun. Now, I’m not saying they are wild, for goodness sake, I’m just saying some of them need to learn how to behave in a classroom as,now and then, they fail to see the difference between the classroom and the schoolyard, lesson time and break time .
This is the cartoon and these are Mrs Mutner’s rules( from now on, mine too). Easy to see its potential when trying to explain the formation of the -ing form, although I’m going to use it to go over the rules I have already explained.
My idea is reading Mrs. Mutner’s rules with them, clarifying meanings and then asking students to volunteer to write the rules for the formation of the gerund on the board. Then, students will have to arrange the -ing forms under the right rule.
